What If Rutgers Is Everyone?

But what if it wasn't? What if this fiasco could actually change something? What if the mess in the athletic department at Rutgers could trigger a cultural shift, or at least hit the pause button, on the consuming madness of college sports? What if it provoked a reconsideration of the whole crazy thing—how students playing games for schools has become such a craven business vulnerable to envy and greed and poor judgment?

You would think some reconsideration is in order. Rutgers, on the verge of a showy entry into the Big Ten Conference, finds itself in yet another college-sports controversy, once more self-inflicted. It has already lost a basketball coach over charges—and videotape—of verbal and physical abuse, and dismissed a supervising athletic director as well. Over the holiday weekend, the Star-Ledger published a startling report that the school's new athletic director, Julie Hermann—the person hired to lead Rutgers out of this crisis—was herself accused of verbal abuse by her players while a women's volleyball coach at Tennessee in the 1990s. The letter, reportedly authorized by all 15 students on the team, claimed that Hermann had referred to players as "whores, alcoholics and learning disabled."

Hermann said in a statement Monday she was never notified of the letter, and called it "heartbreaking." She acknowledged being an "intense coach," but noted the "vast difference" between "high intensity" and "abusive behavior." Rutgers president Robert Barchi said Monday that Hermann will keep her job. On Tuesday, another issue came back to light: In 2008, Hermann, then an assistant athletic director at Louisville, was involved in a sex-discrimination lawsuit brought by a female assistant track-and-field coach. A jury awarded the coach $300,000, but a Kentucky appeals court overturned the verdict. The coach's lawyer has appealed to the Kentucky Supreme Court.

The whole thing would be funny if it weren't so unfunny.

Now the Rutgers controversy rushes off in the usual directions. Once again there will be calls for leaders to leave, perhaps Hermann, perhaps Barchi. This is how institutional problems get "solved" in the modern era—with a swift cut at the top. This is what Rutgers hoped for in April.

The second conversation (also a tedious repeat from April) is about our own standards for coaching behavior and whether or not we are softening—as if the controversies roiling Rutgers are less a matter of out-of-line coaches and more a function of society's thinning skin. This is delicious red meat, easy for the tough-talkers to flex a phony biceps about wimp culture.

These conversations don't solve a thing. It's just distraction.

Because what's not happening in Jersey is really the only thing that should be happening—not just at Rutgers but at every other college and university—which is a look deep down inside, to the guts of it all, to how college sports reached a point where malfunction became not the risk, but almost the rule. What's most depressing about the meltdown at Rutgers is not the original debacle or the subsequent debacle (or the university's apparent inability to conduct a thorough personnel background check). No, the depressing part is how utterly unsurprising it is, how accustomed we have all become to the steady beat of implosions in the win-or-else world of collegiate sports.

But what's worse is when these symptoms are just scalpeled from the patient, as if there's no correlation between the dysfunction and the surrounding environment. What almost always drags these colleges down are the very things they are pursuing: wins and attention, but mostly money, money and money. There's just an assumption that these benefits are positive, that the big time is worth it, that expensive coaches and conference expansion and mega TV contracts all serve a greater good—networks and fans love it, and it's foolish to not want a piece. When a program strays, the NCAA singles it out as roguish, a label that allows the lucrative NCAA ecosystem to escape serious investigation. TV networks cover crises without a glance at the role TV dollars play in fueling the mania. Oh well. Easier to focus on small mistakes and throw a few scapegoats overboard than to examine the big picture.

Maybe that examination can happen at Rutgers. Maybe there can be a step back, or at least a polite pause of momentum, and a school can have a healthy conversation about what it wants when it wants to be part of college sports. Maybe the current leadership can be part of this. Maybe they won't. Maybe there can be a serious conversation about how a school should measure athletic success, what values truly matter, what it will and won't do to win, what alumni really want when they say they want to be proud. Maybe this means change. Maybe it means being different. Maybe it means losing games and dollars. But maybe then Rutgers gets back on track. Maybe Rutgers becomes a model of how to do it right.

What if this could happen? What if this kind of thinking was possible? What if this could be a launch pad to re-examine the whole flawed passion that is college sports?

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